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Salesforce Summer ’18 Release Date + Preview Information

The sun is peeking its head around the corner here in the UK, and Salesforce Summer ’18 is doing the same around the globe. Yes, that’s right, it’s that wonderful time of the year that greets us during Spring, Summer & Winter. The Salesforce Release cycle.

As I’m sure most of you veterans know the three Salesforce releases are year are when us Admins, Developer and Consultants get a bunch more features and tools to play around with to delight our customers and users. If you’re new to Salesforce, you’re in for a treat. There is a lot of agenda items you need to prepare for with each release but at this stage, there are only a couple of things you need to know, how to prepare your sandbox, and when your instance gets upgraded.

Sandbox Preview Information

The first thing you should be aware of is how and when your Sandbox is going to be upgraded. This is extremely important as this is the first opportunity you will get to test your system on the new release. You will be able to sign up to Pre-release Org’s and Developer Org’s with Summer ’18 switched on in the very near future, but these of course, will not have any of your config.

Salesforce has two release windows for Sandboxes, which depends on whether your sandbox is a “Preview” instance or “Non-Preview Instance”. Salesforce released a handy blog post which contains all the information you need to figure out which your sandbox is. The two release dates for Sandbox’s are 4/5th May & 8/9th June, this is over a month apart so it’s my recommendation you ensure at least one of your sandboxes is a “Preview” instance.

Salesforce Summer ’18 Release Date

The second thing you should be aware of it when your production instance will be upgraded to the Summer ’18 release. As per the previous section, it’s important that you test all your main use cases in Salesforce before this date to ensure that everything continues to work. Although there is rarely any chance of this, it’s important that these checks are carried out anyway.

The Release Date for Summer ’18 will depend on your instance of Salesforce, but the majority of production instances are upgraded in June, with the exceptions of a couple in May. If you already know the instance your production Org is located on, you can head over to Salesforce Trust and click on your instance name and hit “Maintenances”, this will show you the date of the Salesforce Summer ’18 release hitting your Org.

If you don’t know your instance, the quickest way is to head to company information within Setup in your Salesforce Org (Or look at the URL link of Salesforce in your browser if you are not using Lightning or MyDomains).

If you’re new to Salesforce Trust and would like to learn more, I recommend checking out Ines Garcia’s post regarding signing up for notifications on Trust.Salesforce.com.